Yahoo Autos At Le Mans, Cadillac Fights to Conquer Its Ancestral Home
If you know the Cadillac V-Series.R, the sound you associate with it is probably the outrageous roar of the car’s 5.5-liter V-8 bump starting after rolling out of a pit lane on electric power. GM sports-car boss Laura Wontrop Klauser thinks about a different sound, the one she has not heard yet. She thinks about the American national anthem, played when a factory Corvette won its class at Le Mans in 2023. It has not been played during celebrations for an overall win in half a century. The Cadillac sports-car racing program she leads is designed to end that 55-year drought.
“We’re representing our country here,” Klauser told Road & Track. “We’re not just representing our brand.... I want to hear the American national anthem in France.”
On a fateful weekend last month, Cadillac almost accomplished just that. The historic win was in play all the way into hour 22 of the event. That result was washed away by the final storm of a soaking wet race. Another disappointment, another year without the “Star Spangled Banner” playing in France.
The Cadillac story starts in France, more than 300 years before a Ford GT40 first put the American flag on the top step of the podium at Le Mans. It starts in France, of all places, where a man named Antoine Laumet was born at the turn of the 18th century. Laumet would adopt the title sieur de Cadillac and go to a land then-called New France, where he would establish a fort in Michigan that would become Detroit. Two hundred years later, an American brand began to produce luxury cars bearing his name. Until now, those cars have never been generally available in Cadillac’s patronymic homeland. If General Motors gets its way, Cadillac will join Peugeot and Renault as a staple on French roads.
“This is home, if you will,” global Cadillac vice president told R&T. “This is where it all began with Antoine Laumet. His family crest, the iteration of his family crest, adorns the front of every vehicle we sell.” If Cadillac succeeds here, it returns triumphant to an ancestral home the company’s founders never knew.
While the dream of Cadillacs selling at volume in France is relatively new, the massive racing program behind it has been building for decades. Cadillac has some racing history, but factory-level support began nearly a hundred years after the brand’s founding when the Northstar LMP first raced at Le Mans in 2000. That program struggled to contend in the top class of global sports-car racing even as GM-run Corvettes regularly dominated in the GT1 class. Cadillac’s racing program started again in 2004, closer to the bottom of the sports-car ladder when CTS-V, and later ATS-V, racers ran in what is now called SRO GT World Challenge. That program saw major success, and so did the Daytona-winning DPi-V.R that returned Cadillac to top-level American prototype racing in the 2017 IMSA season.
The rules behind the IMSA-only DPi class led to the creation of LMDh, a rule set that allowed manufacturers to race in both U.S. and European series with the same car. Cadillac leapt at the opportunity, following up the DPi-V.R with the V-Series.R in 2023. That car now races full time in both IMSA and the FIA World Endurance Championship, and three factory-run cars ran both the 2023 and 2024 24 Hours of Le Mans. Cadillac is now fighting directly for the single most prestigious race win available to an automaker, the event that made endurance racing a foundational pillar of motorsport.
At the heart of the pursuit is an operation spanning two series. Action Express Racing, the 2023 winners of both the IMSA championship and the 12 Hours of Sebring, field one car in IMSA. Chip Ganassi Racing fields two, one in IMSA and another in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Ganassi’s IMSA car won one race each last year and this year, while the team’s sole WEC entry peaked with a podium at Le Mans in 2023. All three entries unite for Le Mans, taking Cadillac from an undersized single-car operation in other WEC rounds to a three-car Goliath. That matches Cadillac with Ferrari and Porsche, the only other two manufacturers who bring three factory-backed cars to the race.
As the brand’s IMSA results suggest, this is supposed to be a serious effort. That makes the lack of success in Europe a very real disappointment, but that will turn to triumph in an instant if Cadillac leaves its imprint on the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The team came close this year, closer than last year’s podium finish in this race, but a defining victory at the Circuit de la Sarthe still eludes the V-Series.R program.
In response to that disappointment, the partnership with Ganassi comes to an end next year. The Ganassi team brought two-thirds of Cadillac’s factory effort in the 24-hour classic to France knowing that it would be the team’s last Le Mans in the top class until a new major partner can be secured. For Ganassi, and for its schedule-blocked IndyCar drivers Alex Palou and Scott Dixon, there is no next year, and there is no guarantee of a 2026 either.
There is no such urgency for Cadillac itself. After moving on from Ganassi, this effort will expand to two cars in the FIA WEC and add at least one new entry in IMSA with two different still-unannounced partners. That means plenty of weapons at this race in 2025.
So, why a Cadillac? GM could have chosen to take on the top class at Le Mans with a Corvette-branded prototype, as it did in Grand-Am and later IMSA racing in the 2010s before Cadillac entered the fray. Global Cadillac vice president John Roth tells R&T that Cadillac is here in part as a celebration of the brand’s relatively newfound performance culture.
It is no coincidence that the program is coming online alongside heavy hitters like the current CT4-V and CT5-V Blackwing models. Executive chief engineer Brandon Vivian told R&T that “for what is in the lineup, how many vehicles, and how sophisticated the vehicles are, elevating where we were racing was important.” That, he says, led to an evolution in where the brand raced. “So we moved from production-based race cars to prototypes. We love endurance racing, it really proves the product. Being at the world’s premier 24-hour race is another attraction along this elevation and expansion philosophy we’ve been on.”
That lines up with another big dream for Cadillac, a planned entry alongside Andretti Global in Formula 1. That bid has been approved by the FIA but was rejected by F1 itself, leaving the possibility of GM-powered Andretti F1 cars up in the air until Andretti either gets a spot on the grid or gives up.
In France, those performance goals are not as important as a general plan to build awareness of the brand. The CT4-V and CT5-V Blackwings are not planned for this market. Here, Cadillac is supposed to be an electric brand. The upcoming Opulent Velocity concept will eventually show how exactly the V and Blackwing badges will translate to electric performance. Here, specifically, racing at Le Mans is more about participating in a key tradition for French audiences than it is about showing exactly how great the brand’s traditional performance offerings can be.
Le Mans is part of a major push to sell the Cadillac’s EVs in France, where its light-up evolutions of the once-named “Art and Science” design language aligns well with the Peugeots and Renaults that are so popular among domestic buyers. A Lyriq is also featured in the Tour de France, the nation’s other great Summer sporting tradition. Another Lyriq adorns a massive billboard along a highway in Paris. Across the street from the Palais Garnier opera house, a two-floor Cadillac storefront offers Parisians the chance to spend hands-on time with both the Lyriq and the upcoming Optiq.
But there would be no bigger statement than a win at Le Mans. This is the biggest single prize an automaker can win. Outside of Ford-powered privateers in the 1975 and 1980 races, it has been won only by major auto manufacturers. Of those automakers, only Lorraine-Dietrich, Simca, and inaugural winner Chenard-Walcker have since gone out of business. In a world where energy-drink corporations are winning F1 world championships, Le Mans is still a race that is effectively only winnable by an elite program put together by a major manufacturer.
This race is, unusually, a bigger deal for manufacturers than it is for drivers. The badge on the front matters here more than anywhere else. In the Fifties, Ferrari permanently stamped a performance heritage with a long stretch of dominance here. In the Sixties, Ford proved world-class capabilities by dethroning that dynasty. From the Seventies on, this has been Porsche’s race with only limited interruption. It is a kingmaker for corporations, and the powers that be at Cadillac certainly want to be kings.
The last 21 races have been won by just five automakers. Three of those are Porsche, Ferrari, and Audi, which, combined, have won 43 of the 93 races ever run. Porsche and Ferrari are still on the grid, as is recent five-time-consecutive winner Toyota. It is a more competitive grid than the one Ford famously beat in its four-race winning streak from 1966 through 1969, the only four races ever won by an American brand.
If Cadillac can win in this environment, it would instantly establish the brand as a performance juggernaut in Europe. An odd goal for a company selling only EVs on the continent, but a substantial bragging point nonetheless to boast alongside electric performance cars expected to bear the V designation seen on both the Le Mans racer and the company’s current fleet of performance sedans.
GM knows the way Le Mans can make a performance name in Europe because it has already used that exact plan to sell Corvettes on the old continent. Over four model generations, the screaming V-8s of yellow Corvette Racing cars running down the Mulsanne Straight showed the market that America’s sports car could compete directly with Porsche, Ferrari, and all the rest of the best GT racing brands in the world. The Vette is far from a volume hit in Europe, but it has outlasted a wide variety of other GM projects on the continent to stake a claim as a viable performance-car option. The relationship between European owners and the 24 Hours of Le Mans remains strong too; even without a factory racing program in Europe to back, Corvettes still filled a dedicated infield corral and dotted campsites throughout the track this year.
Not only has no American car won the overall race since 1969, none has taken pole since 1967. Cadillac came achingly close this year. A late red flag almost seemed like enough to end the session with Cadillac driver (and Le Mans native) Sebastien Bourdais on pole, but the red came with exactly enough time for competitors to run one more lap. Alex Lynn, another Cadillac driver, used that lap to pass Bourdais and make for a potential first-row lockout. Then, Kevin Estre turned a slight draft from an LMP2 car into a heroic final sector on his only shot at pole, putting the No. 7 Porsche 963 up front instead. The pre-race favorites at Porsche started up front, demoting the Cadillacs to second and third. Impressive, but not something that anyone bothers to write down a half-century later.
As the race began, the hope instilled in the program during qualifying began to fade. Both Ganassi Cadillacs, the blue No. 2 that runs full time in WEC and the yellow No. 3 visiting from IMSA, fell down the order early. Action Express’s red No. 311 moved up through the field, but none of the three were in contention to lead at any point on Saturday. When sunset came, all three Cadillacs could still be heard roaring around the track, but none looked like a possible winner.
Hope emerged at night. In the blue No. 2, two-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou began to pass other cars in the middle of the massive LMDh field. Cadillac looked like it had one particularly lively entry, and when a night-spanning safety car kept the field close together throughout a massive rain storm, all three cars remained on the lead lap.
With six hours to go, each car in the Cadillac stable seemed to find its final fate at once. An Aston Martin rolled over to bring out a safety car, opening a window for the blue No. 2 to stay out off-cycle from sixth and inherit the lead with about half a tank of gas less than the competition. During the safety car period, the yellow No. 3 broke on track. Twenty minutes after the restart, the red No. 311 crashed hard in the same corner as the GT-class Aston Martin that brought out the safety car. Cadillac No. 3 would retire, while No. 311 would return to the track to finish 31 laps down.
The No. 2 was more fortunate. Alex Palou again put together a heroic stint, first keeping his lead on older tires and eventually pulling away. With every stop, the Cadillac would again fall to tenth on track. With every equivalent stop from the competition 20 minutes later, it would again emerge with a constantly growing lead that at one point ballooned past 10 seconds. The Cadillac was not fast enough to pull away and win effortlessly, but it was certainly fast enough to give Palou, Lynn, and Earl Bamber a shot to win the thing on track.
When the rains finally came in the final hours of the race, the dream ended. Palou closed his heroic stint from the race lead and handed the reins to qualifying driver Lynn. The team took the opportunity to put on new slick tires, temporarily dropping the car down the order in a competitive race for the overall lead. Lynn should have cycled back near the front when other cars stopped for their own fresh dry-weather tires half a stint later, but rain forced everyone to stop again for wet tires.
That meant the entire field was back on the same pit strategy. It also meant that the time Cadillac burned to get onto fresh slick tires before the rest of the field had been lost. Lynn, and later Palou, still had two hours to cut down 23 seconds of on-track deficit and retake the lead. In the dry, it was possible. In the rain, the LMDh-based Cadillac struggled to keep up with the all-wheel-drive Ferrari and Toyota without burning up its rain tires. Lynn was forced to stop relatively early to pit for new wets, and although breakout star Palou was given the chance to close the race, he had no real opportunity to push in a car that could not keep the wet-weather tires under itself.
That lone remaining Cadillac in contention finished more than two minutes behind the race-winning Ferrari. In every other race in the history of this event, a lead-lap finish has been good for second at worst. In this unusually competitive race, Cadillac’s lead car finished just seventh.
It was an impressive second-year performance, one that proved Cadillac was capable of winning Le Mans overall in the right conditions. Unlike last year’s merely respectable race to third, it ended without any sort of trophy.
Cadillac will be back next year with at least its two factory cars in the FIA World Endurance Championship. If it chooses to enter every car that the brand is rumored to run in IMSA and the FIA WEC, five cars with factory backing from three different teams could reach the grid. These rules are in place until at least 2029, so Cadillac should have five more shots to make the V-Series.R immortal. The program is more than capable.
There are no guarantees, and eventually there will be no next year either. Even with a competitive and memorable car, GM’s luxury brand faces tall odds. Those are the kind of odds that would make victory in France, the brand’s ancestral homeland, all the more powerful.
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